Customer Reviews

The Paintings of Our Lives: Poems

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Schulman's poetry has a hopeful tone, a tone based in faith, art and the physical. Too often, however, it fails to move me as poetry.
Most notably, the images are rarely fresh. Unlike the poetry of Gavin, the images never led to a "I'd never thought of it that way." The only image that caused second thoughts was of a horse-mounted policeman hugging his horse "until helmet and reins are one." Here I paused because the image didn't make sense - the rounded compactness of helmet with the thin length or reins ... a helmet with a tail? Typical images: sunset's stained-glass colors" or monarch butterflies' wings "orange-and-black stained glass" or "his voice is a rainstorm that rinses air to reveal earth's surprises."
The language leans towards prose in the sense of complete sentences, a quality Shulman often uses to advantage in the more personal poems where it lends a sense of honesty (as opposed to artifact). The language is firmly grounded in detail "wind peel a sand rose," "no hawk swoops down from a TV antenna." Occasionally obscure words are used i.e. "fusilladed" but more frequently it is references "Li Po" or "Tai Chin" that require significant cultural knowledge. She compensates for this with end notes.
There are several poems worth rereading:"God speaks" in which prior versions of the world and many gods are described with delightful humor and serious purpose; "The Dancers" a tribute to her parents dancing in the Depression unaware of what the future held; and several sonnets of the "One Year Without Mother" sequence - "What Can You Believe" which exposes the vacillation in belief/disbelief in God; "Ring Sale" which exposes lingering uneasiness over a family heirloom; "Requiem", Mozart's to be exact.
Not a bad volume, simply, for me, quite forgettable.